Fugue
by Lena Ban Obsidian
Summary: Shido takes a walk and some time to think. Rated for language


_Fugue_  
Lena

Notes: Getting the feel of it. Not yet tried a Nightwalker fic. 

* * *

He'd never had a taste for music. That was Cain's thing. Harmonies and counterparts or whatever; really turned the old guy on. 

Shido preferred silence, himself. 

The day faded slow, hovering just beyond extinction, like the smoke of a cigarette: death tangible, in murky silver wispiness, easily inhaled and just as easily blown away. As night took hold the world itself seemed to growl; there was a concert going on not too far from the offices, rock and roll and techno. It had attracted motorcyclists, bicyclists, walkers, truckers, head-bangers and weed-smokers. It was like all of Tokyo was crowding into what was essentially Shido's backyard. Noisy. 

He had a headache. 

"Shido?" Guni flittered close to his face, curious. Instinct made his hand sweep up, smack her away before he realized what he was doing. The little demon went flying out of control in wild spirals across the room, only barely catching her balance before she hit the wall. He offered her a sheepish smile for apology, but she didn't look like she was keen on accepting it. "JeeeeeeeZUS, Shido, watch what you're doing!" 

Riho had been sleeping in a corner of the kitchen, curled up cat-like; she peered tiredly out of the doorway at them, head about a foot above the floor. "...what's all the racket about?" 

"Shido's trying to kill me, that's what!" Harrumphing, the little fae-creature crossed her arms over her chest and looked resolutely away, determined to hold a grudge. 

"Shido-san?" From the tone of her voice, Riho found such ideas irrational. He smiled at her, helped her up from the floor. He still wasn't sure why she preferred to sleep there, but didn't feel it was important to ask. "You're overreacting, Guni." 

As one might have predicted, Guni didn't take well to being disagreed with; quickly enough, the two were bantering back and forth across the room, Riho now wide awake and Guni slowly shifting gears from 'angry' to 'amused.' 

The noise of it made the headache worse, so he murmured some excuse and slipped out, sucking in the cool fresh air like a drowning man. It was no better outside, the warm-up riffs of the concert shattering any hope he had of perhaps evading the headache. It was December twenty-first, winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Vampire's paradise; best night for prowling, easiest kills of the year. Cain had said, once, with a disdainful sniff, that _some_ vampires celebrated the winter solstice by having huge parties and revealing themselves to humans, tempting them with the promise of a fantastic revel. It sounded like a fair enough bet. He'd never bothered to ask Cain about the apparent sin--whichever it was--inherent in such parties. Probably revealing oneself; Cain had certainly never disapproved of feasting. 

He started walking, bored out of his mind, head throbbing. Personally, Shido preferred to spend solstice nights as far away from humanity as possible. Solstice nights were...weird. Whatever underlying magical principle it was that upheld the world he knew so well, the world of demons and man combined...that thread of magic grew powerful, intoxicating, _dangerous_ on solstice nights. It exerted its will on the world it governed, and he did not like to become subject to that will even for brief moments. 

_Damn_ but his head hurt. He wondered if the use of a drug would do him any good. Probably not. Not unless it was strong and laced through some blood he happened to find willingly offered. Oh, right. And while he was at it, he might as well wish that he were human again. Or that he could remember the past that Cain and Cain alone knew. 

And that subject in its entirety was so, _so_ frustrating... 

Walking with the brisk assuredness most often assumed by businessmen, he stalked away from the concert hall, the office, the city itself, in the direction of the nearest mountain. Getting there was no problem, but when he decided he ought to go back in the morning, he would probably regret it. Yayoi was out of town on holiday leave; he'd known and not mentioned that she was getting involved with a particularly friendly young man from Norway. The boy seemed honest enough. And it was Yayoi's decision anyway, so he had no complaints. Still, no Yayoi meant no blood. Riho was coping by hibernating in the kitchen like some particularly adorable form of bear. Himself, he preferred to treat it as a fast, a testament to his principles. If he could last until Yayoi got back, then he was being true to those things he held dear. If not... 

He hoped there wasn't an 'if not.' 

As he climbed the mountain, it got colder. Winter chill, worse because of the winds, because of the storm rising to swallow what seemed all of Japan and, by default, all of the world itself. He'd originally had trouble reconciling that particular peculiarity of Japanese society. How could some tiny, un-surprising cluster of islands form 'the world' for a whole people? Talk about ethnocentrism, and you were talking about Japan. As an educated man--a scientist, no less--he'd found it laudable to think that way. 

But as the years passed, as he'd watched the world passing by and gotten to know this place, it had become more understandable. One could see how the natural beauty of a place is easily attributed to the will of gods above, kindly gods who care for the world that they've created perhaps more than some western thinking might hold. One might say he'd been converted, but then, he'd never really been anything else previous, not that he could remember. No change from one thing to another. 

Reaching the mountaintop, he paused for breath he didn't need and peered down at the world. 

"Pretty, isn't it?" 

Amber eyes narrowed to slits, while he remained otherwise at ease, seeming to turn with natural curiosity to the speaker. The voice was too carefree, too innocent. Too familiar. She sat nearby, silent as death, distant eyes smiling at him in a way that sent chills up his spine. She was as adorable and young as she'd seemed before, in that accursed well, when he'd been too tired to think of a way out, mind running in circles that hadn't mattered anyway. She hadn't been human. 

_But if she had...What if she had been? What then?_

"I've gotten accustomed to it, yes," He finally offered by way of answer, not trusting her but too unsure of how quickly he could run. He didn't dare confront her in battle; if it could be avoided, he'd prefer to do just that. With an eerie smile, she shook her head. The motion seemed doll-like, as if she did not truly control herself, or her joints were sticking...perhaps both, or neither. In spite of his instincts warning him to hold his ground, he took a step back, turning to face her fully, not wanting his guard down. 

The eyes never changed from that glass-like, distant, other-worldly expression. "You are a strange little creature, young vampire," she murmured, licking her fangs, baring them, growling without sound. He found that his lip curled in response, without his decision for it to do so. There was something very _wrong_ about her, something that both made him want to fight her here and now and to leave her be, to run and hide if she'd only let him. He also got the feeling that she _wouldn't_ let him. She'd been waiting long enough as it was. Six years; enough time to have run if he'd truly wanted to. 

But that was the way that Cain liked to think. _If you'd wanted to die, Shido, then you would have killed yourself by now._ "...am I?" 

"Very." A halo of stars, faint glimmers of matter in an empty vaccuum, framed her head, like some great cosmic joke executed by the artist who had wrought the universe. The thought bothered him. "I've been watching you, and you seem stranger every day. Like...a human, almost." 

His knees threatened to go water-weak on him at those words, as her eyes finally caught and held his. They were deep pools; endless, as terrible as the abyss of Hell, and as inescapable. He swallowed, thickly, and willed himself to look away, but could not. The faint amber light of his own eyes was lost in the darkness of hers. "...human?" He breathed back, tremulous. 

Still smiling with those ageless, knowing eyes, she slowly stood, stepped over to him. His body knelt as she drew closer, his arms open to her as if for an embrace, as if they'd missed each other in the time they'd been apart. "I've wondered," she continued, amiable, explaining perhaps because she enjoyed the fear that came off him in waves. He was outmatched, that much he was sure of. What was she going to do? "...wondered quite a bit..." She stepped into his arms, nestled right up to him like any human child. The instant their eyes broke contact, he realized he was lost. He still couldn't move. "...do you taste like a human? What _do_ you taste like?" 

Much to his dismay, it was not a rhetorical question, but a scientific one, the sort with which he was all too familiar. Her question: what did he taste like? The solution: Taste him. 

Her fangs were sharp and tiny, like the bite of a small scorpion. Not as immediately threatening, but several times as deadly. As the child-vampire began to drink, the world spun around him; he clutched to her, shuddering, stomach twisting. The world narrowed to one tiny point and rocked with all the violence of a bus slamming headlong into a pickup truck. What had begun a completely novel sensation became a lancing pain that spiked through him, made him drowsy and confused, poisoning him. He lurched, felt his heart flutter sympathetically to the sensation, heard his voice make a soft whimpering sound as she kept suckling at his neck for long moments more. 

It was over quickly enough; she stepped away and let his body fall to the ground, licking her lips, almost innocent in the concealment of night's shadow. "...Not quite. But very close." His headache was worse than before, the hunger unbearable. Everything seemed sluggish, the world huge and bright and bewildering; the one time he'd ventured to try illicit substances, he'd been handed opiate by an all-too willing poet friend. He'd been alive then, felt the high thoroughly. It had given him nightmares; he got the feeling that this experience would be much the same, and hated himself for thinking that. She smiled again and bent to kiss his forehead in farewell, dark amusement rife in those dark eyes. "Let's meet again, Shido-chan. Perhaps in another six years? Well," she laughed. "That's assuming you make it to shelter before sunrise." 

He wanted to call her blasphemous things, somewhere inside of himself; but his whole body, and most of his mind, seemed to be drifting, drug-hazed by her venom, if she'd actually had venom. 

"Sayonara," she whispered softly, stepping backwards and out of sight, her whisper-soft voice as gentle as the wind rolling over the mountain. He shivered with cold, and grabbed hold of that disconnected sensation, focusing on it, forcing his mind to work, forcing his hands to curl, to help him push himself up, get to his unsteady feet and stumble down the mountain. He fell some of the way, crawled the rest, and got to the slums before the sky began to lighten. That queasy numbness he would have associated with intoxication, had it been possible for him to get drunk, never left, the headache thundering through his skull without mercy. 

He could hear the heavy bass beat of the concert, not so close as before but not so far away. It was just that little ironic twist he would have liked to do without, and had he been feeling better he would have scowled. 

No. He'd never liked music at all. 

End


End file.
